You're the top!
You're the Great
Houdini!
You're the top!
You are Mussolini!(1)

Soon after he arrived in
Switzerland in 1902, 18
years old and looking for
work, Benito Mussolini
was starving and penniless. All he had in his pockets was a
cheap nickel medallion of Karl Marx.

Following a spell of vagrancy, Mussolini found a job as a
bricklayer and union organizer in the city of Lausanne.
Quickly achieving fame as an agitator among the Italian
migratory laborers, he was referred to by a local
Italian-language newspaper as "the great duce [leader] of the
Italian socialists." He read voraciously, learned several foreign
languages,(2) and sat in on Pareto's lectures at the university.

The great duce's fame was so far purely parochial. Upon his
return to Italy, young Benito was an undistinguished member
of the Socialist Party. He began to edit his own little paper,
La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle), ferociously
anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, and anti-Catholic. He took
seriously Marx's dictum that the working class has no country,
and vigorously opposed the Italian military intervention in
Libya. Jailed several times for involvement in strikes and
anti-war protests, he became something of a leftist hero.
Before turning 30, Mussolini was elected to the National
Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, and made editor
of its daily paper, Avanti! The paper's circulation and
Mussolini's personal popularity grew by leaps and bounds.

Mussolini's election to the Executive was part of the capture
of control of the Socialist Party by the hard-line Marxist left,
with the expulsion from the Party of those deputies (members
of parliament) considered too conciliatory to the bourgeoisie.
The shift in Socialist Party control was greeted with delight by
Lenin and other revolutionaries throughout the world.

From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his
day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous,
charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer,
a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless
duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future
Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.

In 1913, while still editor of Avanti!, he began to publish and
edit his own journal, Utopia, a forum for controversial
discussion among leftwing socialists. Like many such socialist
journals founded in hope, it aimed to create a highly-educated
cadre of revolutionaries, purged of dogmatic illusions, ready
to seize the moment. Two of those who collaborated with
Mussolini on Utopia would go on to help found the Italian
Communist Party and one to help found the German
Communist Party.(3) Others, with Mussolini, would found
the Fascist movement.

The First World War began in August 1914 without Italian
involvement. Should Italy join Britain and France against
Germany and Austria, or stay out of the war?(4) All the top
leaders and intellectuals of the Socialist Party, Mussolini
among them, were opposed to Italian participation.

In October and November 1914, Mussolini switched to a
pro-war position. He resigned as editor of Avanti!, joined
with pro-war leftists outside the Socialist Party, and launched
a new pro-war socialist paper, Il Popolo d'Italia (People of
Italy).(5) To the Socialist Party leadership, this was a great
betrayal, a sell-out to the whoremasters of the bourgeoisie,
and Mussolini was expelled from the Party. It was as
scandalous as though, 50 years later, Guevara had announced
that he was off to Vietnam, to help defend the South against
North Vietnamese aggression.

Italy entered the war in May 1915, and Mussolini enlisted. In
1917 he was seriously wounded and hospitalized, emerging
from the war the most popular of the pro-war socialists, a
leader without a movement. Post-war Italy was hag-ridden by
civil strife and political violence. Sensing a revolutionary
situation in the wake of Russia's Bolshevik coup, the left
organized strikes, factory occupations, riots, and political
killings. Socialists often beat up and sometimes killed soldiers
returning home, just because they had fought in the war.
Assaulting political opponents and wrecking their property
became an everyday occurrence.

Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist
movement(6) in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the
left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists.(7) They
took with them some non-socialist nationalists and futurists,
and recruited heavily among soldiers returning from the war,
so that the bulk of rank-and-file Fascists had no leftwing
background. The Fascists adopted the black shirts(8) of the
anarchists and Giovinezza (Youth), the song of the front-line
soldiers.

Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy,
the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate
left, democratic, and liberal measures, and for more than a
year the new movement was not notably more violent than
other socialist groupings.(9) However, Fascists came into
conflict with Socialist Party members and in 1920 formed a
militia, the squadre (squads). Including many patriotic
veterans, the squads were more efficient at arson and terror
tactics than the violently disposed but bumbling Marxists, and
often had the tacit support of the police and army. By 1921
Fascists had the upper hand in physical combat with their
rivals of the left.

The democratic and liberal elements in Fascist preaching
rapidly diminished and in 1922 Mussolini declared that "The
world is turning to the right." The Socialists, who controlled
the unions, called a general strike. Marching into some of the
major cities, blackshirt squads quickly and forcibly
suppressed the strike, and most Italians heaved a sigh of
relief. This gave the blackshirts the idea of marching on Rome
to seize power.As they publicly gathered for the great march,
the government decided to avert possible civil war by bringing
Mussolini into office; the King "begged" Mussolini to become
Prime Minister, with emergency powers. Instead of a
desperate uprising, the March on Rome was the triumphant
celebration of a legal transfer of authority.

The youngest prime minister in Italian history, Mussolini was
an adroit and indefatigable fixer, a formidable wheeler and
dealer in a constitutional monarchy which did not become an
outright and permanent dictatorship until December 1925,
and even then retained elements of unstable pluralism
requiring fancy footwork. He became world-renowned as a
political miracle worker. Mussolini made the trains run on
time, closed down the Mafia, drained the Pontine marshes,
and solved the tricky Roman Question, finally settling the
political status of the Pope.

Cole Porter -- sang Mussolini's
praises

Mussolini was showered with
accolades from sundry quarters.
Winston Churchill called him "the
greatest living legislator." Cole
Porter gave him a terrific plug in
a hit song. Sigmund Freud sent
him an autographed copy of one
of his books, inscribed to "the Hero of Culture."(10) The
more taciturn Stalin supplied Mussolini with the plans of the
May Day parades in Red Square, to help him polish up his
Fascist pageants.

The rest of il Duce's career is now more familiar. He
conquered Ethiopia, made a Pact of Steel with Germany,
introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1938,(11) came into the
war as Hitler's very junior partner, tried to strike out on his
own by invading the Balkans, had to be bailed out by Hitler,
was driven back by the Allies, and then deposed by the
Fascist Great Council, rescued from imprisonment by SS
troops in one of the most brilliant commando operations of
the war, installed as head of a new "Italian Social Republic,"
and killed by Communist partisans in April 1945.

Given what most people today think they know about
Fascism, this bare recital of facts(12) is a mystery story.
How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be
so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in
the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into
equally dedicated Fascist militants?

What They Told Us about Fascism

In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism"(13) in the
English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic,
Italian novelty(14) into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under
the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was
disseminated which has remained dominant among
intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:

Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big
Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally
threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were
put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was
challenged by the revolutionary working class.(15) We
naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass
movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big
Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly
clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual
doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its
content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a
matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing,
flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more
than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who
have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.

As Marxists used to say, fascism "appeals to the basest
instincts," implying that leftists were at a disadvantage because
they could appeal only to noble instincts like envy of the rich.
Since it is irrational, fascism is sadistic, nationalist, and racist
by nature. Leftist regimes are also invariably sadistic,
nationalist, and racist, but that's because of regrettable
mistakes or pressure of difficult circumstances. Leftists want
what's best but keep meeting unexpected setbacks, whereas
fascists have chosen to commit evil.

More broadly, fascism may be defined as any totalitarian
regime which does not aim at the nationalization of industry
but preserves at least nominal private property. The term can
even be extended to any dictatorship that has become
unfashionable among intellectuals.(16) When the Soviet
Union and People's China had a falling out in the 1960s, they
each promptly discovered that the other fraternal socialist
country was not merely capitalist but "fascist." At the most
vulgar level, "fascist" is a handy swear-word for such hated
figures as Rush Limbaugh or John Ashcroft who, whatever
their faults, are as remote from historical Fascism as anyone in
public life today.

The consequence of 70 years of indoctrination with a
particular leftist view of fascism is that Fascism is now a
puzzle. We know how leftists in the 1920s and 1930s thought
because we knew people in college whose thinking was
almost identical, and because we have read such writers as
Sartre, Hemingway, and Orwell.

But what were Fascists thinking?

Some Who Became Fascists

Robert Michels was a German Marxist disillusioned with the
Social Democrats. He became a revolutionary syndicalist. In
1911 he wrote Political Parties, a brilliant analytic work,(17) demonstrating the impossibility of "participatory
democracy"--a phrase that was not to be coined for half a
century, but which accurately captures the early Marxist
vision of socialist administration.(18) Later he became an
Italian (changing "Robert" to "Roberto") and one of the
leading Fascist theoreticians.

Hendrik de Man was the leading Belgian socialist of his day
and recognized as one of the two or three most outstanding
socialist intellects in Europe--many in the 1930s believed him
to be the most important socialist theoretician since Marx. He
is the most prominent of the numerous Western European
Marxists who wrestled their way from Marxism to Fascism or
National Socialism in the interwar years. In more than a dozen
thoughtful books from The Remaking of a Mind (1919), via
The Socialist Idea (1933), to Après Coup (1941) de Man
left a detailed account of the theoretical odyssey which led
him, by 1940, to acclaim the Nazi subjugation of Europe as "a
deliverance." His journey began, as such journeys so often
did, with the conviction that Marxism needed to be revised
along "idealist" and psychological lines.(19)

Two avant-garde artistic movements which contributed to
the Fascist worldview were Futurism and Vorticism. Futurism
was the brainchild of Filippo Marinetti, who eventually lost his
life in the service of Mussolini's regime. You can get some
idea of the Futurist pictorial style from the credits for the
Poirot TV series. Its style of poetry was a defining influence
on Mayakovsky. Futurist arts activities were permitted for
some years in the Soviet Union. Futurism held that modern
machines were more beautiful than classical sculptures. It
lauded the esthetic value of speed, intensity, modern
machinery, and modern war.

Pound, found to be
mentally ill because he
supported fascism"

Vorticism was a somewhat
milder variant of Futurism,
associated with Ezra
Pound and the painter and
novelist Wyndham Lewis,
an American and a Canadian who transplanted to London.
Pound became a Fascist, moved to Italy, and was later found
mentally ill and incarcerated by the occupying Americans. The
symptoms of his illness were his Fascist beliefs. He was later
released, and chose to move back to Italy in 1958, an
unreprentant Fascist.

In 1939 the avowed fascist Wyndham Lewis retracted his
earlier praise for Hitler, but never renounced his basically
fascist political worldview. Lewis was, like George Bernard
Shaw, one of those intellectuals of the 1930s who admired
Fascism and Communism about equally, praising them both
while insisting on their similarity.

Fascism must have been a set of ideas which inspired
educated individuals who thought of themselves as extremely
up-to-date. But what were those ideas?

Five Facts about Fascism

Over the last 30 years, scholarship has gradually begun to
bring us a more accurate appreciation of what Fascism was.(20) The picture that emerges from ongoing research into the
origins of Fascism is not yet entirely clear, but it's clear
enough to show that the truth cannot be reconciled with the
conventional view. We can highlight some of the unsettling
conclusions in five facts:

Fascism was a doctrine well elaborated years before it
was named. The core of the Fascist movement launched
officially in the Piazza San Sepolcro on 23rd March 1919
was an intellectual and organizational tradition called "national
syndicalism."

As an intellectual edifice, Fascism was mostly in place by
about 1910. Historically, the taproot of Fascism lies in the
1890s--in the "Crisis of Marxism" and in the interaction of
nineteenth-century revolutionary socialism with fin de siècle
anti-rationalism and anti-liberalism.

Fascism changed dramatically between 1919 and 1922,
and again changed dramatically after 1922. This is what
we expect of any ideological movement which comes close to
power and then attains it. Bolshevism (renamed Communism
in 1920) also changed dramatically, several times over.

Many of the older treatments of Fascism are misleading
because they cobble together Fascist pronouncements, almost
entirely from after 1922, reflecting the pressures on a broad
and flexible political movement solidifying its rule by
compromises, and suppose that by this method they can
isolate the character and motivation of Fascist ideology. It is
as if we were to reconstruct the ideas of Bolshevism by
collecting the pronouncements of the Soviet government in
1943, which would lead us to conclude that Marxism owed a
lot to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

Fascism was a movement with its roots primarily in the
left. Its leaders and initiators were secular-minded, highly
progressive intellectuals, hard-headed haters of existing
society and especially of its most bourgeois aspects.

There were also non-leftist currents which fed into Fascism;
the most prominent was the nationalism of Enrico Corradini.
This anti-liberal, anti-democratic movement was preoccupied
with building Italy's strength by accelerated industrialization.
Though it was considered rightwing at the time, Corradini
called himself a socialist, and similar movements in the Third
World would later be warmly supported by the left.

Fascism was intellectually sophisticated. Fascist theory
was more subtle and more carefully thought out than
Communist doctrine. As with Communism, there was a
distinction between the theory itself and the "line" designed for
a broad public. Fascists drew upon such thinkers as Henri
Bergson, William James, Gabriel Tarde, Ludwig Gumplowicz,
Vilfredo Pareto, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Sorel, Robert
Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Filippo
Marinetti, A.O. Olivetti, Sergio Panunzio, and Giovanni
Gentile.

Here we should note a difference between Marxism and
Fascism. The leader of a Marxist political movement is always
considered by his followers to be a master of theory and a
theoretical innovator on the scale of Copernicus. Fascists
were less prone to any such delusion. Mussolini was more
widely-read than Lenin and a better writer, but Fascist
intellectuals did not consider him a major contributor to the
body of Fascist theory, more a leader of genius who could
distil theory into action.

Fascists were radical modernizers. By temperament they
were neither conservative nor reactionary. Fascists despised
the status quo and were not attracted by a return to bygone
conditions. Even in power, despite all its adaptations to the
requirements of the immediate situation, and despite its
incorporation of more conservative social elements, Fascism
remained a conscious force for modernization.(21)

Two Revisions of Marxism

Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a
revision which developed in successive stages, so that these
Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as
Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as
socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as
anti-liberal revolutionaries.

The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist
intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist
movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in
those years that Marxism had survived into a world which
Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers
were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into
sections with different interests, technological advance was
accelerating rather thanmeeting a roadblock, the "rate of
profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors
("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial
concentration was not increasing,(22) and in all countries the
workers were putting their country above their class.

In high theory, too, the hollowness of Marxism was being
exposed. The long-awaited publication of Volume III of
Marx's Capital in 1894 revealed that Marx simply had no
serious solution to the "great contradiction" between Volumes
I-II and the real behavior of prices. Böhm-Bawerk's
devastating critiques of Marxian economics (1884 and 1896)
were widely read and discussed.

Eduard Bernstein -- a Marxist
revisionist

The Crisis of Marxism gave birth to the
Revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, which
concluded, in effect, that the goal of
revolution should be given up, in favor of
piecemeal reforms within capitalism.(23)
This held no allure for men of the hard left who rejected
existing society, deeming it too loathsome to be reformed.
Revisionists also began to attack the fundamental Marxist
doctrine of historical materialism--the theory that a society's
organization of production decides the character of all other
social phenomena, including ideas.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, leftists who wanted
to be as far left as they could possibly be became syndicalists,
preaching the general strike as the way to demonstrate the
workers' power and overthrow the bourgeois order.
Syndicalist activity erupted across the world, even in Britain
and the United States. Promotion of the general strike was a
way of defying capitalism and at the same time defying those
socialists who wanted to use electoral methods to negotiate
reforms of the system.

Syndicalists began as uncompromising Marxists, but like
Revisionists, they acknowledged that key tenets of Marxism
had been refuted by the development of modern society.
Most syndicalists came to accept much of Bernstein's
argument against traditional Marxism, but remained
committed to the total rejection, rather than democratic
reform, of existing society. They therefore called themselves
"revolutionary revisionists." They favored the "idealist revision
of Marx," meaning that they believed in a more independent
role for ideas in social evolution that that allowed by Marxist
theory.

Practical Anti-Rationalism

In setting out to revise Marxism, syndicalists were most
strongly motivated by the desire to be effective
revolutionaries, not to tilt at windmills but to achieve a realistic
understanding of the way the world works. In criticizing and
re-evaluating their own Marxist beliefs, however, they
naturally drew upon the intellectual fashions of the day, upon
ideas that were in the air during this period known as the fin
de siècle. The most important cluster of such ideas is
"anti-rationalism."

Many forms of anti-rationalism proliferated throughout the
nineteenth century. The kind of anti-rationalism which most
influenced pre-fascists was not primarily the view that
something other than reason should be employed to decide
factual questions (epistemological anti-rationalism). It was
rather the view that, as a matter of sober recognition of
reality, humans are not solely or even chiefly motivated by
rational calculation but more by intuitive "myths" (practical
anti-rationalism). Therefore, if you want to understand and
influence people's behavior, you had better acknowledge that
they are not primarily self-interested, rational calculators; they
are gripped and moved by myths.(24)

Paris was the fashion center of the intellectual world, dictating
the rise and fall of ideological hemlines. Here, anti-rationalism
was associated with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, William
James's Pragmatism from across the Atlantic, and the
social-psychological arguments of Gustave Le Bon. Such
ideas were seen as valuing action more highly than cogitation
and as demonstrating that modern society (includingthe
established socialist movement) was too rationalistic and too
materialistic. Bergson and James were also read, however, as
contending that humans did not work with an objectively
existing reality, but created reality by imposing their own will
upon the world, a claim that was also gleaned (rightly or
wrongly) from Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. French
intellectuals turned against Descartes, the rationalist, and
rehabilitated Pascal, the defender of faith. In the same spirit,
Italian intellectuals rediscovered Vico.

Practical anti-rationalism entered pre-Fascism through
Georges Sorel(25) and his theory of the "myth." This
influential socialist writer began as an orthodox Marxist. An
extreme leftist, he naturally became a syndicalist, and soon the
best-known syndicalist theoretician. Sorel then moved to
defending Marx's theory of the class struggle in a new
way--no longer as a scientific theory, but instead as a "myth",
an understanding of the world and the future which moves
men to action. When he began to abandon Marxism, both
because of its theoretical failures and because of its excessive
"materialism," he looked for an alternative myth. Experience
of current and recent events showed that workers had little
interest in the class struggle but were prone to patriotic
sentiment. By degrees, Sorel shifted his position, until at the
end of his life he became nationalistic and anti-semitic.(26)
He died in 1922, hopeful about Lenin and more cautiously
hopeful about Mussolini.

A general trend throughout revolutionary socialism from 1890
to 1914 was that the most revolutionary elements laid an
increasing stress upon leadership, and downplayed the
autonomous role of the toiling masses. This elitism was a
natural outcome of the revolutionaries' ardent wish to have
revolution and the stubborn disinclination of the working class
to become revolutionary.(27) Workers were instinctive
reformists: they wanted a fair shake within capitalism and
nothing more. Since the workers did not look as if they would
ever desire a revolution, the small group of conscious
revolutionaries would have to play a more decisive role than
Marx had imagined. That was the conclusion of Lenin in
1902.(28) It was the conclusion of Sorel. And it was the
conclusion of the syndicalist Giuseppe Prezzolini whose
works in the century's first decade Mussolini reviewed
admiringly.(29)

The leadership theme was reinforced by the theoretical
writings of, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, especially Pareto's
theory of the Circulation of Elites. All these arguments
emphasized the vital role of active minorities and the futility of
expecting that the masses would ever, left to themselves,
accomplish anything. Further corroboration came from Le
Bon's sensational best-seller of 1895--it would remain
perpetually in print in a dozen languages--The Psychology of
Crowds, which analyzed the "irrational" behavior of humans in
groups and drew attention to the group's proclivity to place
itself in the hands of a strong leader, who could control the
group as long as he appealed to certain primitive or basic
beliefs.(30)

The initiators of Fascism saw anti-rationalism as high-tech. It
went with their fast cars and airplanes. Fascist
anti-rationalism, like psychoanalysis, conceives of itself as a
practical science which can channel elemental human drives in
a useful direction.

A Marxist Heresy?

Some people have reacted to Fascism by saying that it's just
the same as socialism. In part, this arises from the fact that
"fascism" is a word used loosely to denote all the
non-Communist dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s, and
by extension to refer to the most powerful and horrible of
these governments, that of German National Socialism.

The Nazis never claimed to be Fascists, but they did
continually claim to be socialists, whereas Fascism, after
1921, repudiated socialism by name. Although Fascism had
some influence on the National Socialist German Workers'
Party, other influences were greater, notably Communism and
German nationalism.

A. James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy,(31) a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a
doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class
struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization
of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those
tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism,
and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism.
Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close
ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We
may compare this with the relationship between, say,
Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the
distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot
of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.

In power, the actual institutions of Fascism and Communism
tended to converge. In practice, the Fascist and National
Socialist regimes increasingly tended to conform to what
Mises calls "the German pattern of Socialism."(32)
Intellectually, Fascists differed from Communists in that they
had to a large extent thought out what they would do, and
they then proceeded to do it, whereas Communists were like
hypnotic subjects, doing one thing and rationalizing it in terms
of a completely different and altogether impossible thing.

Fascists preached the accelerated development of a
backward country. Communists continued to employ the
Marxist rhetoric of world socialist revolution in the most
advanced countries, but this was all a ritual incantation to
consecrate their attempt to accelerate the development of a
backward country. Fascists deliberately turned to nationalism
as a potent myth. Communists defended Russian nationalism
and imperialism while protesting that their sacred motherland
was an internationalist workers' state. Fascists proclaimed the
end of democracy. Communists abolished democracy and
called their dictatorship democracy. Fascists argued that
equality was impossible and hierarchy ineluctable.
Communists imposed a new hierarchy, shot anyone who
advocated actual equality, but never ceased to babble on
about the equalitarian future they were "building". Fascists did
with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes
shut. This is the truth concealed in the conventional formula
that Communists were well-intentioned and Fascists
evil-intentioned.

Disappointed Revolutionaries

Though they respected "the irrational" as a reality, the
initiators of Fascism were not themselves swayed by wilfully
irrational considerations.(33) They were not superstitious.
Mussolini in 1929, when he met with Cardinal Gasparri at the
Lateran Palace, was no more a believing Catholic than
Mussolini the violently anti-Catholic polemicist of the pre-war
years,(34) but he had learned that in his chosen career as a
radical modernizing politician, it was a waste of time to bang
his head against the brick wall of institutionalized faith.

Leftists often imagine that Fascists were afraid of a
revolutionary working-class. Nothing could be more
comically mistaken. Most of the early Fascist leaders had
spent years trying to get the workers to become
revolutionary. As late as June 1914, Mussolini took part
enthusiastically, at risk of his own life and limb, in the violent
and confrontational "red week." The initiators of Fascism
were mostly seasoned anti-capitalist militants who had time
and again given the working class the benefit of the doubt.
The working class, by not becoming revolutionary, had let
these revolutionaries down.

Preferred Fascism to Marxism

In the late 1920s, people like Winston
Churchill and Ludwig von Mises saw
Fascism as a natural and salutory
response to Communist violence.(35)
They already overlooked the fact that Fascism represented an
independent cultural phenomenon which predated the
Bolshevik coup. It became widely accepted that the future lay
with either Communism or Fascism, and many people chose
what they considered the lesser evil. Evelyn Waugh remarked
that he would choose Fascism over Marxism if he had to, but
he did not think he had to.

It's easy to see that the rise of Communism stimulated the rise
of Fascism. But since the existence of the Soviet regime was
what chiefly made Communism attractive, and since Fascism
was an independent tradition of revolutionary thinking, there
would doubtless have been a powerful Fascist movement
even in the absence of a Bolshevik regime. At any rate, after
1922, the same kind of influence worked both ways: many
people became Communists because they considered that the
most effective way to combat the dreaded Fascism. Two rival
gangs of murderous politicos, bent on establishing their own
unchecked power, each drummed up support by pointing to
the horrors that the other gang would unleash. Whatever the
shortcomings of any such appeal, the horrors themselves were
all too real.(36)

From Liberism to the Corporate State

In Fascism's early days it encompassed an element of what
was called "liberism," the view that capitalism and the free
market ought to be left intact, that it was sheer folly for the
state to involve itself in "production."

Marx had left a strange legacy: the conviction that resolute
pursuit of the class struggle would automatically take the
working class in the direction of communism. Since practical
experience offers no corroboration for this surmise, Marxists
have had to choose between pursuing the class struggle
(making trouble for capitalism and hoping that something will
turn up) and trying to seize power to introduce communism
(which patently has nothing to do with strikes for higher
wages or with such political reforms as factory safety
legislation). As a result, Marxists came to worship "struggle"
for its own sake. And since Marxists were frequently
embarrassed to talk about problems a communist society
might face, dismissing any such discussion as "utopian", it
became easy for them to argue that we should focus only on
the next step in the struggle, and not be distracted by
speculation about the remote future.

Traditional Marxists had believed that much government
interference, such as protective tariffs, should be opposed, as
it would slow down the development of the productive forces
(technology) and thereby delay the revolution. For this
reason, a Marxist should favor free trade.(37) Confronted by
a growing volume of legislative reforms, some revolutionaries
saw these as shrewd concessions by the bourgeoisie to take
the edge off class antagonism and thus stabilize their rule. The
fact that such legislative measures were supported by
democratic socialists, who had been co-opted into the
established order, provided an additional motive for
revolutionaries to take the other side.

All these influences might persuade a Marxist that capitalism
should be left intact for the foreseeable future. In Italy, a
further motive was that Marxists expected the revolution to
break out in the industrially advanced countries. No Marxist
thought that socialism had anything to offer a backward
economy like Italy, unless the revolution occurred first in
Britain, America, Germany, and France. As the prospect of
any such revolution became less credible, the issue of Italian
industrial development was all that remained, and that was
obviously a task for capitalism.

After 1919, the Fascists developed a theory of the state; until
then this was the one element in Fascist political theory which
had not been elaborated. Its elaboration, in an extended
public debate, gave rise to the "totalitarian" view of the state,(38) notoriously expounded in Mussolini's formula,
"Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing
outside the state." Unlike the later National Socialists of
Germany, the Fascists remained averse to outright
nationalization of industry. But, after a few years of
comparative non-intervention, and some liberalization, the
Fascist regime moved towards a highly interventionist policy,
and Fascist pronouncements increasingly harped on the
"corporate state." All traces of liberism were lost, save only
for the insistence that actual nationalization be avoided.
Before 1930, Mussolini stated that capitalism had centuries of
useful work to do (a formulation that would occur only to a
former Marxist); after 1930, because of the world
depression, he spoke as if capitalism was finished and the
corporate state was to replace it rather than providing its
framework.

As the dictatorship matured, Fascist rhetoric increasingly
voiced explicit hostility to the individual ego. Fascism had
always been strongly communitarian but now this aspect
became more conspicuous. Fascist anti-individualism is
summed up in the assertion that the death of a human being is
like the body's loss of a cell. Among the increasingly histrionic
blackshirt meetings from 1920 to 1922 were the funeral
services. When the name of a comrade recently killed by the
Socialists was called out, the whole crowd would roar:
"Presente!"

Man is not an atom, man is essentially social--these woolly
clichés were as much Fascist as they were socialist.
Anti-individualism was especially prominent in the writings of
official philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who gave Fascist social
theory its finished form in the final years of the regime.(39)

The Failure of Fascism

Fascist ideology had two goals by which Fascism's
performance may reasonably be judged: the creation of a
heroically moral human being, in a heroically moral social
order, and the accelerated development of industry, especially
in backward economies like Italy.

The fascist moral ideal, upheld by writers from Sorel to
Gentile, is something like an inversion of the caricature of a
Benthamite liberal. The fascist ideal man is not cautious but
brave, not calculating but resolute, not sentimental but
ruthless, not preoccupied with personal advantage but fighting
for ideals, not seeking comfort but experiencing life intensely.
The early Fascists did not know how they would install the
social order which would create this "new man," but they
were convinced that they had to destroy the bourgeois liberal
order which had created his opposite.

Even as late as 1922 it was not clear to Fascists that Fascism,
the "third way" between liberalism and socialism, would set up
a bureaucratic police state, but given the circumstances and
fundamental Fascist ideas, nothing else was feasible. Fascism
introduced a form of state which was claustrophobic in its
oppressiveness. The result was a population of decidedly
unheroic mediocrities, sly conformists scared of their own
shadows, worlds removed from the kind of dynamic human
character the Fascists had hoped would inherit the Earth.

As for Fascism's economic performance, a purely empirical
test of results is inconclusive. In its first few years, the
Mussolini government's economic measures were probably
more liberalizing than restrictive. The subsequent turn to
intrusive corporatism was swiftly followed by the world slump
and then the war. But we do know from numerous other
examples that if it is left to run its course, corporatist
interventionism will cripple any economy.(40) Furthermore,
economic losses inflicted by the war can be laid at Fascism's
door, as Mussolini could easily have kept Italy neutral.
Fascism both gave unchecked power to a single individual to
commit such a blunder as to take Italy to war in 1940 and
made this more likely by extolling the benefits of war.

In the panoramic sweep of history, Fascism, like
Communism, like all forms of socialism, and like today's
greenism and anti-globalism, is the logical result of specific
intellectual errors about human progress. Fascism was an
attempt to pluck the material fruits of liberal economics while
abolishing liberal culture.(41) The attempt was entirely
quixotic: there is no such thing as economic development
without free-market capitalism and there is no such thing as
free-market capitalism without the recognition of individual
rights. The revulsion against liberalism was the outcome of
misconceptions, and the futile attempt to supplant liberalism
was the application of further misconceptions. By losing the
war, Fascism and National Socialism spared themselves the
terminal sclerosis which beset Communism.

"The Man Who Is Seeking"

When Mussolini switched from anti-war to pro-war in
November 1914, the other Socialist Party leaders
immediately claimed that he had been bought off by the
bourgeoisie, and this allegation has since been repeated by
many leftists. But any notion that Mussolini sold out is more
far-fetched than the theory that Lenin seized power because
he was paid by the German government to take Russia out of
the war. As the paramount figure of the Italian left, Mussolini
had it made. He was taking a career gamble at very long odds
by provoking his own expulsion from the Socialist Party, in
addition to risking his life as a front-line soldier.(42)

Like Lenin, Mussolini was a capable revolutionary who took
care of finances. Once he had decided to come out as
pro-war, he foresaw that he would lose his income from the
Socialist Party. He approached wealthy Italian patriots to get
support for Il Popolo d'Italia, but much of the money that
came to Mussolini originated covertly from Allied
governments who wanted to bring Italy into the war. Similarly,
Lenin's Bolsheviks took aid from wealthy backers and from
the German government.(43) In both cases, we see a
determined group of revolutionaries using their wits to raise
money in pursuit of their goals.

Jasper Ridley argues that Mussolini switched because he
always "wanted to be on the winning side", and dare not
"swim against the tide of public opinion."(44) This
explanation is feeble. Mussolini had spent all his life in an
antagonistic position to the majority of Italians, and with the
founding of a new party in 1919 he would again deliberately
set himself at odds with the majority. Since individuals are
usually more influenced by the pressure of their "reference
group" than by the opinions of the whole population, we might
wonder why Mussolini did not swim with the tide of the
Socialist Party leadership and the majority of the Party
membership, instead of swimming with the tide of those
socialists inside and outside the Party who had become
pro-war.

Although his personality may have influenced the timing, or
even the actual decision, the pressure for Mussolini to change
his position came from a long-term evolution in his intellectual
convictions. From his earliest years as a Marxist
revolutionary, Mussolini had been sympathetic to syndicalism,
and then an actual syndicalist. Unlike other syndicalists, he
remained in the Socialist Party, and as he rose within it, he
continued to keep his ears open to those syndicalists who had
left it. On many issues, his thinking followed theirs, more
cautiously, and often five or ten years behind them.

From 1902 to 1914, Italian revolutionary syndicalism
underwent a rapid evolution. Always opposed to
parliamentary democracy, Italian syndicalists, under Sorel's
influence, became more committed to extra-constitutional
violence and the necessity for the revolutionary vanguard to
ignite a conflagration. As early as 1908, Mussolini the
syndicalist Marxist had come to agree with these elitist notions
and began to employ the term gerarchia (hierarchy), which
would remain a favorite word of his into the Fascist period.

Many syndicalists lost faith in the revolutionary potential of the
working class. Seeking an alternative revolutionary recipe, the
most "advanced" of these syndicalists began to ally themselves
with the nationalists and to favor war. Mussolini's early
reaction to this trend was the disgust we might expect from
any self-respecting leftist.(45) But given their premises, the
syndicalists' conclusions were persuasive.

Nkrumah and friends face the camera

The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was
unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either
in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like
Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low
industrial output.(46) Italy was an exploited proletarian
nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois
nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the
productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These
ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the
1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically
backward countries represented their own less than
scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would
accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to
Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's
footsteps.(47) Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for
post-war Third Worldism.

Nixon and friend caught by the camera

Many syndicalists also became "productionists," urging that
the workers ought not to strike, but to take over the factories
and keep them running without the bosses. While
productionism as a tactic of industrial action did not lead
anywhere, the productionist idea implied that all who helped
to expand output, even a productive segment of the
bourgeoisie, should be supported rather than opposed.

From about 1912, those who closely observed Mussolini
noted changes in his rhetoric. He began to employ the words
"people" and "nation" in preference to "proletariat."
(Subsequently such patriotic language would become
acceptable among Marxists, but then it was still unusual and
somewhat suspect.) Mussolini was gradually becoming
convinced, a few years later than the most advanced leaders
of the extreme left, that Marxist class analysis was useless,
that the proletariat would never become revolutionary, and
that the nation had to be the vehicle of development. An
elementary implication of this position is that leftist-initiated
strikes and violent confrontations are not merely irrelevant
pranks but actual hindrances to progress.

When Mussolini founded Utopia, it was to provide a forum
at which his Party comrades could exchange ideas with his
friends the revolutionary syndicalists outside the Party. He
signed his articles at this time "The Man Who Is Seeking."
The collapse of the Second International on the outbreak of
war, and the lining up of the mass socialist parties of
Germany, France, and Austria behind their respective national
governments, confirmed once again that the syndicalists had
been right: proletarian internationalism was not a living force.
The future, he concluded, lay with productionist national
syndicalism, which with some tweaking would become
Fascism.

Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international
movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois
democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would
everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century
would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist
contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both
democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance
Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people
in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by
governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than
they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism.

The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.

But Fascism lived on.... "Most of the world's people in
the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by
governments which were closer in practice to Fascism
than they were either to liberalism or to
Marxism-Leninism."

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From 1912 to 1914,
Mussolini was the Che
Guevara of his day, a
living saint of leftism.
Handsome, courageous,
charismatic, an erudite
Marxist, a riveting
speaker and writer, a
dedicated class warrior
to the core, he was the
peerless duce of the
Italian Left. He looked
like the head of any future
Italian socialist
government, elected or
revolutionary.

Mussolini was showered
with accolades from
sundry quarters. Winston
Churchill called him "the
greatest living
legislator." Cole Porter
gave him a terrific plug in
a hit song. Sigmund
Freud sent him an
autographed copy of one
of his books, inscribed to
"the Hero of Culture."
The more taciturn Stalin
supplied Mussolini with
the plans of the May Day
parades in Red Square, to
help him polish up his
Fascist pageants.

As Marxists used to say,
fascism "appeals to the
basest instincts,"
implying that leftists were
at a disadvantage
because they could
appeal only to noble
instincts like envy of the
rich. Since it is irrational,
fascism is sadistic,
nationalist, and racist by
nature. Leftist regimes are
also invariably sadistic,
nationalist, and racist,
but that's because of
regrettable mistakes or
pressure of difficult
circumstances.

Vorticism was a
somewhat milder variant
of Futurism, associated
with Ezra Pound and the
painter and novelist
Wyndham Lewis, an
American and a
Canadian who
transplanted to London.
Pound became a Fascist,
moved to Italy, and was
later found mentally ill
and incarcerated by the
occupying Americans.
The symptoms of his
illness were his Fascist
beliefs. He was later
released, and chose to
move back to Italy in
1958, an unreprentant
Fascist.

Many of the older
treatments of Fascism are
misleading because they
cobble together Fascist
pronouncements, almost
entirely from after 1922,
reflecting the pressures
on a broad and flexible
political movement
solidifying its rule by
compromises, and
suppose that by this
method they can isolate
the character and
motivation of Fascist
ideology. It is as if we
were to reconstruct the
ideas of Bolshevism by
collecting the
pronouncements of the
Soviet government in
1943, which would lead
us to conclude that
Marxism owed a lot to
Ivan the Terrible and
Peter the Great.

Here we should note a
difference between
Marxism and Fascism.
The leader of a Marxist
political movement is
always considered by his
followers to be a master of
theory and a theoretical
innovator on the scale of
Copernicus. Fascists were
less prone to any such
delusion. Mussolini was
more widely-read than
Lenin and a better writer,
but Fascist intellectuals
did not consider him a
major contributor to the
body of Fascist theory,
more a leader of genius
who could distil theory
into action.

The Crisis of Marxism
gave birth to the
Revisionism of Eduard
Bernstein, which
concluded, in effect, that
the goal of revolution
should be given up, in
favor of piecemeal reforms
within capitalism. This
held no allure for men of
the hard left who rejected
existing society, deeming
it too loathsome to be
reformed.

A general trend
throughout revolutionary
socialism from 1890 to
1914 was that the most
revolutionary elements
laid an increasing stress
upon leadership, and
downplayed the
autonomous role of the
toiling masses. This
elitism was a natural
outcome of the
revolutionaries' ardent
wish to have revolution
and the stubborn
disinclination of the
working class to become
revolutionary.

The Nazis never claimed
to be Fascists, but they
did continually claim to
be socialists, whereas
Fascism, after 1921,
repudiated socialism by
name. Although Fascism
had some influence on the
National Socialist
German Workers' Party,
other influences were
greater, notably
Communism and German
nationalism.

Leftists often imagine that
Fascists were afraid of a
revolutionary
working-class. Nothing
could be more comically
mistaken. Most of the
early Fascist leaders had
spent years trying to get
the workers to become
revolutionary. As late as
June 1914, Mussolini
took part
enthusiastically, at risk of
his own life and limb, in
the violent and
confrontational "red
week." The initiators of
Fascism were mostly
seasoned anti-capitalist
militants who had time
and again given the
working class the benefit
of the doubt. The working
class, by not becoming
revolutionary, had let
these revolutionaries
down.

Unlike the later National
Socialists of Germany, the
Fascists remained averse
to outright
nationalization of
industry. But, after a few
years of comparative
non-intervention, and
some liberalization, the
Fascist regime moved
towards a highly
interventionist policy,
and Fascist
pronouncements
increasingly harped on
the "corporate state." All
traces of liberism were
lost, save only for the
insistence that actual
nationalization be
avoided.

The fascist moral ideal,
upheld by writers from
Sorel to Gentile, is
something like an
inversion of the
caricature of a
Benthamite liberal. The
fascist ideal man is not
cautious but brave, not
calculating but resolute,
not sentimental but
ruthless, not preoccupied
with personal advantage
but fighting for ideals, not
seeking comfort but
experiencing life
intensely.

In the panoramic sweep of
history, Fascism, like
Communism, like all
forms of socialism, and
like today's greenism and
anti-globalism, is the
logical result of specific
intellectual errors about
human progress. Fascism
was an attempt to pluck
the material fruits of
liberal economics while
abolishing liberal
culture. The attempt was
entirely quixotic: there is
no such thing as
economic development
without free-market
capitalism and there is no
such thing as free-market
capitalism without the
recognition of individual
rights.

These ideas foreshadowed
the Third World
propaganda of the 1950s
and 1960s, in which
aspiring elites in
economically backward
countries represented
their own less than
scrupulously humane rule
as "progressive" because
it would accelerate Third
World development. From
Nkrumah to Castro, Third
World dictators would
walk in Mussolini's
footsteps.Fascism was a
full dress rehearsal for
post-war Third Worldism.